Best OBS Settings for Streaming Stardew Valley in 2026

Stardew Valley is the easiest game on this site to stream well. It is 2D pixel art with very low motion: the camera scrolls, sprites walk, and that is most of what an encoder ever has to deal with. That means you can stream it beautifully on hardware and internet connections that would fall apart on a shooter. The catch is different: pixel art exposes bad scaling instantly. Blurry or shimmering pixel edges are the number one mistake on Stardew streams, and the fix is in OBS, not in bitrate. Here is the full setup.

Quick Answer

Stardew is the rare game where you can save bandwidth without viewers noticing. That makes it ideal for streamers on slow upload connections or low-end PCs.

Why Stardew Valley Is So Easy to Compress

Encoders love this game for the same reasons players do:

• Very low motion. Most frames are nearly identical to the previous one. Temporal compression, the encoder's main trick, works at close to its theoretical best.

• Flat colors and hard edges. Pixel art has large regions of identical color with no gradients, film grain, or particle noise. There is simply less information to encode.

• Predictable scrolling. When the camera moves, the whole screen shifts uniformly, which motion vectors describe almost for free.

• No dark-gradient banding risk. Even night scenes and the mines use flat stylized darkness rather than smooth gradients.

The practical result: 3,500 to 4,500 Kbps at 1080p 60fps looks essentially transparent. Compare that with the 6,000 Kbps floor we recommend for horror and shooter titles in best OBS bitrate settings. If you are unsure what your connection supports, the streaming bitrate calculator will give you a safe number in seconds.

Recommended OBS Settings by Platform

Twitch

• Resolution: 1920x1080

• FPS: 60

• Encoder: NVENC (New), H.264

• Preset: P5 (Slow)

• Rate Control: CBR

• Bitrate: 4,500 Kbps (3,500 Kbps also looks clean)

• Keyframe Interval: 2 seconds

• Profile: High

• B-frames: 2

• Downscale Filter: Lanczos (36 samples)

Why 60fps for a farming game? Screen scrolling. At 30fps, walking across the farm produces visible judder on the pixel grid; at 60fps it glides. The bitrate cost is small because the frames barely change. Platform limits are on the Twitch platform page.

YouTube Live

• 1080p 60fps: 6,000 to 9,000 Kbps, more is wasted on this game

• 1440p 60fps: 9,000 to 12,000 Kbps if you want extra sharpness for the pixel grid

• Encoder: NVENC H.264 or AV1

Kick

Kick allows around 8,000 Kbps, but Stardew does not need it. 4,500 to 5,000 Kbps at 1080p 60fps is plenty, and the saved headroom keeps your connection stable.

Encoder Settings

NVENC (NVIDIA GPU), recommended

Stardew uses almost no GPU, so any NVENC-capable card from a GTX 1650 up encodes it effortlessly:

• Rate Control: CBR

• Bitrate: 4,500 Kbps (Twitch) or 6,000+ (YouTube)

• Preset: P5, or even P6 since the GPU is idle

• Profile: High

• Psycho Visual Tuning: On

• Look-ahead: On, motion is highly predictable

• B-frames: 2

x264 (CPU) fallback

This is the one game where budget CPUs handle x264 comfortably:

• Preset: Slow on a mid-range CPU, Medium on a true budget chip (Ryzen 5, Core i5, even older quad cores)

• Bitrate: same as NVENC

• Profile: High

Because the game itself barely loads the CPU, x264 Slow at 4,500 Kbps is achievable on hardware that could never stream a 3D game. If you are picking an encoder for a low-end PC, see NVENC vs x264 for streaming.

In-Game Settings That Help Your Stream

Stardew's settings are simple, but scaling is everything for pixel art:

• Window mode: Borderless fullscreen at your monitor's native resolution.

• Zoom level: Use increments that keep pixels at integer multiples (100 percent, or steps that land on whole-pixel scaling). Fractional zoom creates uneven pixel widths that shimmer when the camera scrolls.

• In OBS, avoid fractional scaling of the game capture. If your canvas is 1080p, run the game at 1080p so no rescale happens, or downscale from exactly 1440p. Scaling 1080p content up or down by odd fractions blurs pixel edges.

• Downscale Filter: Lanczos, always. Bilinear smears pixel art; Lanczos keeps edges crisp.

• Lighting quality: High costs nothing on any modern machine.

One content note: Stardew lives in the cozy category, where viewers keep streams on for hours as background company. Consistent, readable image quality and a pleasant audio mix (game music slightly under your voice, mic around -6 dB, 160 Kbps AAC) matter more than raw sharpness for retention.

Internet Requirements

This is Stardew's superpower. At 3,500 to 4,500 Kbps, you can stream comfortably on a 6 to 8 Mbps upload, connections where a 6,000 Kbps shooter stream would drop frames constantly. Check your line with the bandwidth calculator; if the result is tight, drop to 3,500 Kbps and viewers will still get a clean picture. It is also the perfect game for streaming from a laptop or an older desktop, since game, encoder, and OBS together barely load the system.

Quick Reference Table

Bottom Line

Stardew Valley is the friendliest game there is to stream: low motion, flat colors, and modest bitrate needs that fit low-end PCs and slow uploads. Run 1080p 60fps at 3,500 to 4,500 Kbps, keep the Lanczos filter on, respect integer scaling for the pixel grid, and spend the effort you saved on being good company for the cozy crowd.